The Internet has quickly become the primary source from which many people gather information they need to make many types of decisions. Research that people have done in the past is now being done over the Internet. Because there is so much information on the World Wide Web, however, it is oftentimes difficult for an individual to gather together information relevant to the individual's interests or needs. This difficulty is due to the fact that there are so many different web sites that must be visited or accessed to obtain the information. Visiting a large number of web sites, however, is a very time intensive undertaking.
People look to the World Wide Web for information for many different reasons including accessing health or medical information, historical research, current events and sports information. Perhaps one of the most explosive areas of Internet usage is that of purchasing goods. A task that oftentimes required either traveling from one store to another in order to compare prices, scanning the ads in the Sunday paper or calling by telephone (and hoping to reach an informed salesperson) has now been replaced by clicking into various web sites in order to identify the availabilities and prices of specific goods. While a person can do all of this from the convenience and privacy of his or her own home, traveling from store to store in order to determine what is on sale has been replaced by “surfing” from one web site to another web site to comparison shop.
To alleviate the drudgery of clicking from one web site to another to find the best price, programs called “shop-bots” are known. These are software programs that search the web to find the offered prices for a particular item. In operation, a user enters information about the item, e.g., brand name or model number. The shop-bot program then proceeds to search through a large number of web sites and returns with information regarding the product found from the various sites. The user then reviews the list of sites and prices that has been presented and can then access a particular web site directly.
One disadvantage of these shop-bots is that a particular shop-bot might only access sites that have paid a fee to be included in any searches that are performed. This may exclude, however, sites that have not paid but which have better prices for the particular item. A user of any particular shop-bot needs to know beforehand the inclusiveness or exclusiveness of the sites that will be searched to determine the accuracy of the results. Further, a shop-bot is only really helpful when the potential buyer knows the specific model that is desired. In a situation where the buyer is looking for a generic device without any limitations as to specific brand or model, e.g., any portable CD player, a shop-bot would either return too many results or might not be able to complete the search. A known example of such a shop-bot can be found at www.mysimon.com.
While it may be possible for a shopper to identify the best price for a particular item, this still does not address a shopper who is not necessarily actively looking for a particular item to buy but who is interested in knowing about items and their prices because an item of interest at the right price might cause the person to purchase it. Vendors would like to be able to inform potential buyers that an item is available at a certain price because the availability/price combination might be all that is necessary to entice a person to make the purchase. Of course, if the vendor cannot get the information to the buyer, then no sale will ever occur.
As an alternative to, or in conjunction with, a shop-bot that responds td a query, an individual can also sign up or register to receive a newsletter or notification of items of interest via e-mail. To tailor the newsletter to his or her interests, an individual completes a questionnaire or form that defines the individual's interests. The completed questionnaire defines the individual's profile.
After the profile is complete, it is used by the originator of the newsletter service to prepare a newsletter for delivery to the individual. As an example, the newsletter may be directed to identifying web sites that provide the goods or services that, according to the profile, are of interest to the individual.
Often, however, the individual is not receiving a newsletter that has been customized or prepared specifically for the individual. Instead, the completed profile is used to “lump” the individual into a group of individuals that, for the most part, have common interests. A single newsletter is prepared and bulk e-mailed to the group of individuals.
Providers of electronic newsletters group recipients together to send a single newsletter because preparing a single newsletter for a single user does not scale very efficiently for large numbers of individuals. As the number of recipients becomes larger, a significant amount of computing power, i.e., processors, storage devices and the like, would be necessary to generate the newsletters. If the newsletter is to be prepared in a timely manner, the equipment investment necessary for this mode of operation would be prohibitive.
Therefore, in order to provide a large number of individuals with information that has been timely prepared for each person according to his or her profile, and in a cost effective manner, a new mechanism or approach is necessary.